In cooperation with U.N. Women and Egypt’s Supreme Council for Culture, the Women and Memory Forum hosted an international conference titled “Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation, and the Making of Archives” in Cairo last week.
The aim of the conference was to discuss the challenges facing oral history projects regarding gender in times of change, with a specific focus on the documentation of the narratives of women in the Arab World during the changing circumstances it has recently experienced.
Due to the WMF being a research-based organization, the conference also tackled the methodological and theoretical issues concerning the documentation of the oral narratives of women and the creation of archives for them.
The conference, which ran Sept. 13-15, brought together a diverse group of scholars, researchers, students, artists and practitioners that included both Arab and international participants to exchange views on these topics.
"The goal of bulding an oral history archive for women is to fill the knowledge gap about the roles of women in making history and civilization - Dr. Hoda Al-Sada."
One of the main highlights of the conference was an exhibition that commemorated the prominent late Egyptian feminist and educator Wedad Mettri.
In line with the conference’s focus on the importance of documenting and preserving Arab women’s narratives, the exhibition displayed a collection of Mettri’s private papers to offer a glimpse into her journey, work and ideas.
The collection included black and white photos, Mettri’s handwritten notes which were taken at the variety of meetings and international conferences she attended and a recording in which Mettri talks about her life and work.
The WMF, which was founded in 1995 in Cairo, is a research organization that aims to empower Arab women, further their development and shatter the stereotypes of them.
The WMF hopes to achieve that through “the integration of gender as a category of analysis in the study and interpretation of Arab history and the social sciences in general,” according to the WMF’s official website .
“We believe that one of the main obstacles facing Arab women now is the scarcity of alternative cultural information and knowledge about the role of women in history and in contemporary society.”
To change that, the organization actively works on a number of projects that raise awareness of Arab women;s role in history and contemporary society through oral history documentation methods.
The WMF’s “Who is she in Egypt?” project created a database of prominent Egyptian female experts that provides Arabic and English profiles on their outstanding field achievements.
Another ongoing project is the “Archive of Women’s Voices,” which created a massive oral history library for women’s narratives. In its first phase, the WMF conducted and gathered about 100 oral interviews with women over 75 who played prominent roles in public life.